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Black Widow Film In The Works For Scarlett Johansson

With Marvel’s The Avengers topping the U.S. weekend box office (earning a total of $200,300,000 in its opening weekend) it is no surprise that Marvel is wasting no time moving on to its next film, a standalone project about Scarlett Johansson’s character, Black Widow/Natasha Romanov.

Producer Kevin Feige confirmed that the project is in preparation. Johansson, 27, hinted that the film will be more of a prequel that focuses on the gun-wielding hero’s origin.

Johansson spoke with Ace Showbiz about the project saying:

I love her origin story. I think it’s just such a riveting one… It’s just steeped in history and the richness to shoot in Russia, perhaps… I hope that the fans’ voice is loud enough and they want to see a Widow origin story, I know Marvel would be happy to entertain that. We’ve spoken a lot about it.”

In the same interview, Johansson said her character is not just fighting for the good of the world.

She was almost salvaged by S.H.I.E.L.D. and so she’s loyal to that group, to that agency, but only as sort of paid debt,” she said.

The character Black Widow first appeared in Ultimate Marvel Team-Up #14 (2002).

Her official history, provided by Marvel is as follows:

“A descendant of Russian royalty, Natasha Romanov was abandoned as a child and found by soldier Ivan Petrovich. A ballerina in her youth, she joined Russia’s K.G.B. and became an elite intelligence operative, a combination of consummate skill and classified government enhancements of her natural abilities. She also became infamous as an often-wed, often-widowed heartbreaker whose husbands (beginning with test pilot turned intelligence agent Alexi Shostakov) tended to suffer “unfortunate accidents”, a quirk which may have influenced her choice of long-term code name: the Black Widow. She eventually embarked on a lucrative freelance spy career, which culminated in her infiltration of New York City’s Latverian Embassy.

Manipulating the naïve young superhero Spider-Man into helping her escape Latverian security, Natasha used the information she gathered to audition successfully for the American-based international spy agency S.H.I.E.L.D. She became a mainstay of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s black ops division, often partnered with Hawkeye (Clint Barton).

After Hawkeye and the Widow led the successful extermination of over five hundred Chitauri extraterrestrial subversives, the duo was promoted to the ranks of the Ultimates, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s celebrity super-agents, with newly falsified personal backgrounds. Alongside the Ultimates, Black Widow helped save Earth from a Chitauri plot. She and teammate, Iron Man (Ultimate)”